Sherlock

Sherlock had difficulty making friends.  He was small for his age and afraid of almost everything.  His greatest fear was social interaction, so Sherlock spent his youth with his mother, who worried about him constantly.  Where Sherlock differed from other awkward mother’s-boys was that he was an excellent athlete.  His early physical education teachers were bewildered by the extraordinary abilities hiding behind his diffidence.  Typically, a kid that can hit a homerun and dunk a basketball in junior high is the star of the team.  Sherlock, on the other hand, was too likely to cry in the middle of the game.  A coach in high school tried to recruit a larger, inexplicably muscular Sherlock, but when approached, he threw up and ran to complain to the school counselor. 

Fortunately, Sherlock was also a gifted student.  He excelled in physics and quietly earned a scholarship to a school not far from home.  One night in college, a group of frat boys were passing the lab as Sherlock was leaving, when the largest of them complemented his bicycle.  Assuming they were planning to beat him up or steal his bike, Sherlock shrieked and threw the bike at the approaching hulk.  Confused, upset, and drunk, the group surrounded Sherlock and begin pushing him back and forth.  Sherlock surprised everyone when he kicked the ringleader ten feet back into a dumpster.  He grabbed his book bag, jumped seven feet in the air over the charging group, and sprinted away with the speed of a fighter jet.  He stopped only a few blocks away feeling nauseous.  Naturally, he worried something was wrong with him and carefully went home to consult with Mother and hide under the bed.

When he emerged, Sherlock decided to begin experimenting with his abilities in his spare time.  While learning he could run seventy miles an hour, jump fifty feet in the air, and lift over two thousand pounds, he struggled to balance his scientific curiosity with his fear and insecurity.  He frequently sobbed and was consumed with worry that he would lose control of his body or get noticed.  He woke up one morning hovering eight feet above his bed but refused to test his ability to fly.  When he discovered he was able to temporarily turn himself into a liquid, he fell into a deep depression and wouldn’t leave his room for weeks. 

He thought of inventing a secret identity, but he had never been much of a costume person.  He was too modest for tights and too subdued for a cape.  The idea of a mask had its appeal, but ultimately Sherlock knew there was no better way to hide than to be himself.  Also, any further experiments were out of the question.  The risks, as he always found, far-outweighed the benefits.  Sherlock had no idea why he had superhuman abilities, but he wanted no part of it and went back to his life in the lab.  He was awarded a research grant by a private firm in his hometown and bought a house on his mother’s street so he could stop over and visit every Saturday.

-          Written for “Tuning Out Physics”